McALESTER, Okla. — Oklahoma officials faced an outcry Wednesday as they scrambled to find out what went wrong in the botched execution of an inmate the previous night. The White House joined the public outcry and condemned the execution as inhumane.

Gov. Mary Fallin defended the death penalty but ordered a thorough review by the state’s Department of Public Safety of the state’s procedures for lethal injections in the wake of the failed execution of Clayton Lockett. She said she had asked for a full assessment of Lockett’s cause of death, a review of whether officials had followed execution protocols and whether those protocols needed to be improved.

She promised an independent autopsy of Lockett, who had been sentenced for shooting a woman and burying her alive, and who died 43 minutes after the initiation of a procedure that was supposed to be quick and painless.

Officials said Wednesday night that Lockett’s body is being sent to the Dallas County medical examiner’s office for an independent surgical review.

Oklahoma officials said Lockett had an apparent heart attack 43 minutes after the start of the execution Tuesday in which the state was using a new drug combination for the first time.

The Oklahoma medical examiner’s office said the toxicology portion of the autopsy to determine what drugs were in Lockett’s system had begun.

Fallin. a Republican, said the execution of Charles Warner, originally also planned for Tuesday, would be delayed until May 13 or later if the review is not completed. But, she said, “his fellow Oklahomans have sentenced him to death, and we expect that sentence to be carried out as required by law.”

The problems with the botched execution by injection, in which Lockett kicked, gasped and appeared to try to sit up after he was declared sedated, are expected to fuel the debate about the ability of states to administer lethal injections that meet the Constitution’s requirement that they be neither cruel nor unusual punishment.

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said Wednesday that he had not talked to President Barack Obama about the incident but that the White House viewed the episode as having fallen short of being humane.

“We have a fundamental standard in this country that even when the death penalty is justified, it must be carried out humanely,” Carney said. “And I think everyone would recognize that this case fell short of that standard.”

Carney said that Obama supported the death penalty in some cases, though he had often questioned whether there was any evidence that executions deterred crime. “He believes there are some crimes that are so heinous that the death penalty is merited,” Carney said.

“In this case, or these cases, the crimes are indisputably horrific and heinous.”

As defense attorneys expressed skepticism at Fallin’s promises of a review and lawyers for Warner vowed to take legal action, death penalty opponents called for a moratorium on capital punishment in the state.

Warner’s attorney objected to the investigation being led by a member of Fallin’s Cabinet, Public Safety Commissioner Michael Thompson.

“I don’t consider that to be an independent investigation,” said lawyer Madeline Cohen.

Attorney General Scott Pruitt, whose office has worked to keep from publicly releasing details about the execution drugs, said he intends to assign investigators to work with Thompson. Lockett and Warner had unsuccessfully sued the state for refusing to disclose details about the execution drugs.

The nation’s next scheduled execution is May 13 in Texas, when convicted killer Robert Campbell is slated to die by injection.

Robert Patton, Oklahoma’s director of corrections, said Lockett died of a “massive heart attack.” Patton said two other drugs were administered after Lockett was given a sedative. But when the doctor saw that things were not going as planned, he examined Lockett and determined that there was a problem with the vein and “the line had blown.”

Witnesses described Lockett as lying on the gurney in the execution room, mumbling “man” after being declared unconscious. He was “grimacing, grunting and lifting his head and shoulders entirely up from the gurney,” wrote The Tulsa World’s enterprise editor, Ziva Branstetter, one of 12 news media witnesses at the execution.

The New York Times,

The Washington Post,

The Associated Press

AT A GLANCE: Secrecy over drugs

The vast majority of the 32 death-penalty states refuse to disclose the source of their execution drugs. A look at Texas’ practice:

Position: Texas recently announced that it found a new source of compounded pentobarbital but will not reveal the identity of the supplier, saying that threats against execution drugmakers are escalating.

Challenge: The U.S. Supreme Court previously declined to halt the execution of an inmate who sought to get the prison system to disclose more information about where it gets its lethal-injection drugs.